By the time 2050 rolls around, current decision-makers will either be dead or stuck in old-age homes. Yet the decisions they make today will have a significant effect on the economic and environmental future their grandchildren will face in 44 years.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) — the West’s influential energy watchdog — current emission policies, such the Kyoto Treaty, will not put the world on a path towards a sustainable future by 2050, leaving future generations to deal with a 137% emission increase.
“Urgent action is required to promote, develop and deploy a full mix of energy technologies,” the agency’s director of energy technologies, Neil Hirst, said at a legislators’ dialogue on climate change in Brussels.
The IEA’s warning is contained in its Energy Technology Perspectives: Scenarios and Strategies to 2050 report. It will be presented to the Group of Eight (G8) leaders at St Petersburg next week to advise on alternative strategies aimed at a clean, but competitive energy future.
Our energy future
In the agency’s ideal intervention scenario, which is “relatively optimistic” about the implementation of new technologies, it predicts that coal will account for more than a quarter of the world’s energy resources in 2050, gas for 22%, nuclear energy 16%, hydro-energy 15% and other renewables 15%.
Hirst said significant progress could be made if countries did not put their eggs in one basket, but relied on a host of energy solutions.
Coal
South Africa has an abundance of coal resources, but its contribution to global warming has urged South Africa to look at other resources. Without technological interventions, coal would contribute almost half of the world’s power supply, resulting in an emission increase of 137%.
Although its outlook is bleak, the agency says that by employing technologies that already exist or are under development, carbon dioxide levels can be brought back to today’s level. Technologies such as carbon-capture plants are essential and could extend the environmental life of coal, the IEA said.
The energy watchdog predicts that carbon-capture storage could reduce the emission pumped into the atmosphere by coal plants to almost 0% if the technology is developed to its full potential, giving coal a sustainable future.
Energy efficiency
Energy efficiency is not a strange concept in South Africa with Eskom adverts on radio urging South Africas to save electricity. Eskom is on the right path because the IEA says energy efficiency will play a major role in lowering emissions if fossil fuels are still to be used.
The agency urged consumers to change their behaviour and said that with increases in technologies, buildings could, in future, also be built to be 70% more efficient.
“Windows are now available with three times the insulation value of their predecessors. Modern gas and oil furnaces have attained 95% efficiency,” the IEA said. “Efficient air conditioners use 30% to 40% less energy than the models of 10 years ago.”
District heating, heat pumps and residential solar energy initiatives were critical, while improved lighting technologies could yield cost-effective savings of 30% to 60%, the report said.
Natural gas
Natural gas, which only emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal per kilowatt, is seen as an environmentally friendly alternative to coal.
“The improved efficiency of gas-fired electricity-generating plants is one of the success stories of modern power generation technologies,” Hirst said.
Nuclear power
South Africa is currently working on its fourth-generation nuclear technology, the Pebble Bed Molecular Reactor (PBMR) and according to the IEA it could play a big role in energy demand.
It said that countries comfortable with using nuclear power should use it, but there are three major obstacles to nuclear energy’s further exploitation: large capital outlay, public opposition due to the storage of radioactive waste and possible nuclear accidents, and the possible proliferation of nuclear weapons. But the development of fourth-generation reactors, such as the PBMR, would address some of these hurdles, the agency said.
Renewable energy
Renewable resources have a big role to play, even with the continued use of coal, the agency predicted. With even more optimistic technology advances, usage of renewables could jump to 34% in 2050. For South Africa, solar power is very relevant and technologies such as photovoltaic panels are rapidly growing. But according to the report, solar power will make up less than 2% of power in 2050.
Biofuels
Hydrogen and biofuels are expected to provide 35% of total final transport energy demand in 2050, in a technologised world. More realistically, the agency predicts, it will only contribute about 13%. Hirst said decarbonising transport would take longer, “but must be achieved in the second half of the century”.